Posts Tagged ‘streetart’

Next time you’re driving out of Foods Co. with a truckload of cheap beer, be sure to stop and look across the street. The reclaimed wood exterior of 14th Street’s Bartfeld Sales Co. received a colorful makeover in recent months thanks to local artists.

The boarded-up former Bombay Creamery space is now hosting a chalkboard where passers-by can scribble a proclamation of love, a poem, or maybe some expletives.

No word on whether the chalkboard was an official installation, or if it was the work of an underground street artist. Either way, leave a note on there soon because the construction behind the plywood looks to be progressing quickly.

Local street/concert artist has put up a new piece with a height measuring stick at the old Bombay Creamery space on Valencia. “How high are you?” asks the mural, as though that were a question that could be answered quantitatively.

Be sure to stand in front of this and measure yourself before someone paints over this and you’re forced to go back to robbing 7-Eleven and getting your height measurement from the wanted poster.

All the photos of street art above come from Mitte, the central borough of Berlin. It’s the “capital” of Berlin, if you will. Around the backstreets of Mitte you find abandoned buildings filled covered in illegal art.

There’s some real creativity there, it’s refreshing compared to what we see here in San Francisco. Lots of paste, text, airbrushing, even mixed media. There’s a tinge of geekery to many pieces that you rarely see in the local scene.

But what impressed me the most was how well the artists integrated their pieces into the surroundings. For example, I didn’t even notice the mouse pointer until the forth or fifth time I walked past it. Or the “secret police” in the first image above, which was in and of itself quite secret as it was only visible from one spot.

The best art is the art that belongs where it is in some intangible, indescribable way. Which is to say my photos don’t just suck because I’m a shitty photographer — they suck because it’s not as good as seeing the art in person. And that’s the excuse I’m sticking with.

There was a time when BoingBoing was an underground zine, and being covered in its pages meant you were an up-and-coming phenomenon. Now that BoingBoing is the 11th most popular blog on the internet, your grandmother is probably reading it. Nothing diminishes the cool factor more quickly than when uncool people know about it.

Sometimes I walk through Clarion Alley just to look. It’s not that I don’t want to take photos of the murals, it’s just that I don’t want to be so cliche. But today I decided to take some photos in spite of my own unoriginality, and you’re looking at the result.